An Uncertain Glory book cover
Diederick J. Vandewalle, Associate Professor of Government
Topic 

For my Foreign Study Program in Hyderabad, India, I read Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen's An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions. Amartya Sen is arguably one of the most sophisticated writers—part economist, part philosopher­—on India's contemporary development issues, and his analysis of the country's problems stands in stark contrast to much of the market-oriented strategy India's current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, is advocating. Deeply concerned about the rapidly growing inequalities in India and about what Sen sees as the apathy of India's better-off elites, An Uncertain Glory is a passionate defense of thinking about development in broad humanistic terms, deeply skeptical of the notion that only economic growth matters.